Tag Archives: BotJunkie

Could someone please explain to me why, exactly, roboticists seem to think that it’s such a good idea to give their creations swords? Like, I get that it’s a way to demonstrate grasping and dexterous movements, but if you start with robots demonstrating swords, you move on to robots fighting each other with swords, and this will be our terrifying future. And swordplay seems to be a bad idea for HUBO here more than most, since it repeatedly hits itself in the head with a sword that is thankfully not made out of anything dangerous…

Stanford University is already famous for its autonomous robotic vehicles, including Stanley (who won the DARPA Grand Challenge in 2005) and Junior (runner up in the DARPA Urban Challenge in 2007). This weekend, Stanford held an event to showcase their partnership with Volkswagen on a new $2 million autonomous innovation laboratory. On display was Stanford’s latest autonomous vehicle, a robotic Audi TTS named Shelley. Shelley currently holds the unofficial world speed record for an autonomous car at over 130 mph, and will be racing up Pikes Peak all by herself next year:

Stanford also demonstrated an autonomous valet parking system, where an almost stock Volkswagen Passat entered a parking lot, located an empty space, and parked itself:

I guess the bee crisis is worse than it seems, because the National Science Foundation is giving Harvard a cool $10 million to develop a robot bee colony. That’s right, not just one, but an entire colony of robot bees. The bees will buzz around on flapping wings, use optical flow sensors for navigation and obstacle avoidance, sport cute little antennae as well as “pollination and docking appendages,” and use an as yet unspecified power source…

You ever notice how fish never, ever find themselves stuck in traffic jams? It’s frustrating, isn’t it? You’re stuck on the highway behind some yahoo in a 1994 Volvo 940 turbo wagon driving 3 miles an hour, and over there are a bunch of fish just crusin’ along at full speed. You might think it’s because fish can take advantage of a highway that’s about 1.347 billion cubic kilometers in volume, but you’d be wrong… It’s because they know how to school.

Browsing around the MIT website (as I do from time to time so that you don’t have to), I ran across the web page of Katie Byl (that’s “bill”), who is currently working at the Harvard Microrobotics Lab (on stuff like this). Katie used to study legged locomotion at MIT, which involved developing dynamic motions for LittleDog. And sometimes, these motions didn’t quite work out as planned… Also in the following video are clips of LittleDog walking on pegs (”Karate Kid” style), and a slow motion clip of LittleDog bounding up onto terrain…

Wired posted a gallery on Friday of surgical robots, and Bloodbot here caught my eye, largely because it seemed to be the most practical. The robot consists of an arm with a needle and a probe. In order to find an accessible vein, the robot probes around your arm until it finds an area of flesh that is a little bit less squishy than the rest. Then it jabs you with a needle, and when it feels a little pop indicating that it’s punched through into a vein, it knows to stop the jabbage, lest it go right through the other side of your vein, out the back of your arm, and into your femoral artery, causing a massive amount of hemorrhaging that will no doubt kill you in minutes.

This may not look like the most promising design for a robot, but there’s a lot of potential to be had with robots that can change their shape. These robots, from Ritsumeikan University in Japan, are constructed with spherical shells of spring steel attached to an inner core (which contains the power source and electronics) via shape memory alloy wires. Applying voltage to the wires causes them to contract, deforming the shape of the robot. By doing this, the robot can change its center of gravity to roll in any direction…

While most robot designers shoot for more capable and more complicated robots, the philosophy behind swarm robotics is totally different: make the robots as simple as possible, and let complex capabilities emerge from the cooperative powers of a whole bunch of them. We’re already familiar with macro-scale swarm robots, but researchers in Europe are trying to shrink things down to insect scale.

These tiny (4 millimeters on a side) robots are members of the I-SWARM project…

Last May, we wrote about a 7 gram robot grasshopper that is capable of jumping a distance of 1.4 meters, which is pretty huge for such a small robot. By using reduction gears and legs that act as springs, the robot is a very efficient mover, as well. We commented in that post that “the great thing about jumping is that it combines the advantages of being on the ground with one of the most important advantages of being able to fly: obstacle avoidance.” Of course, the other big advantage of being able to fly is that you can cover large distances quickly and efficiently (albeit mostly due to the aforementioned avoidance of obstacles).

Researchers at EPFL’s Laboratory of Intelligent Systems have made their robot grasshopper into a true flier by…

OhGizmo! is a frequently updated blog that focuses on covering items that will appeal to a very specific and often very passionate audience: the geek. Aside from the fare of innovative consumer electronic products, the reader can expect to find news about geek culture, absurd inventions, awe inspiring technology, and an ever growing assortment of articles that we like to think fit within our view of what we’re calling the Geek Lifestyle.